[Applause] Wow [Applause] [Applause] thank you sir here's the clicker well thank you so much I'm honored to be here what a fabulous crowd thank you so much to the organizers you've done a wonderful job so so congratulations everybody for doing this I want to first say just a word of homage to Dean Ornish who I know just spoke but in case anybody wasn't paying attention I just wanted to mention kind of the miracle that that this man did because he really inspired me you know he brought in people who were perhaps who were perhaps expecting that they would need drugs or surgery or some kind of roto-rooter to clean out their arteries again and with these simple four steps vegetarian foods half hour walk manage stress which is why nobody in Hampton Roads was in the study avoid tobacco he was able to get these amazing changes where cholesterol dropped dramatically LDL bad cholesterol dropped 37% that's what a statin would do but he did this with beans and rice and asparagus people lost weight some people were already skinny so they didn't lose weight but others were quite heavy and the average person lost 22 pounds without counting calories and then what made medical history was the angiograms that he did where you measure that tiny trickle of blood that gets through the coronary arteries and comparing the results after a year to the results at the beginning showed that the arteries were actually opening up which we thought was not possible they were opening up so much that you could see a measurable difference in 82 percent of the patients no surgery no medication nothing just the simple diet and lifestyle choices and so my research team asked the question what if I don't have heart disease what if I just want to lose some weight or what if I need to lose a lot of weight so we brought in 64 women they were all over the age of menopause they had all done every diet note' vanity they had done Atkins in South Beach and Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem and everything else and they all felt stuck and we said well there are two rules no animal products and let's keep oils to a bare minimum and that was surprising to people because they were expecting to have to count calories and eat tiny portions or sweat off the pounds and there were just two rules no animal products keep oils very low we said don't change your exercise patterns at all because we're trying to focus on on what diet changes will do and it was a 22 week study I'm sorry 14 big study in this one and a two year or follow up afterwards and when the patients came in we said here's what we're going to be doing we're gonna use the power plate that means vegetables and fruits and grains and legumes what are legumes beans peas lentils foods that grow in a pod and our research participants thought oh you're gonna have me eating pancakes with syrup and I can eat all the chili I want and I can eat all the pasta I want and they thought they'd gained a huge amount of weight but what happened is that 14 weeks the average person had actually not gained weight they'd lost 13 pounds on average and we did glucose tolerance testing where we assessed their insulin sensitivity and we found that it actually measurably improved and then we tracked people sorry my clickers a little hypothyroid here we tracked them for a to two additional years and what we found is that they never put the weight back on unlike every other diet they had ever been on they were skinnier at a year than at the beginning and skinnier at two years than one year so it was like a one-way street and that's because you're not making a quantitative change only eat this much we're making a qualitative change where we're eating a different kind of food so why does this happen well the first reason is fiber you're eating plants and plants oops sorry plants all have fiber so if you're eating vegetables and fruits and whole grains and beans everything that goes into your mouth is going to have some fiber in it fiber has effectively no calories but it fills you up and so you think you're eating the same amount of food but you're actually less than you were before when you're reading cheese and me and the other thing is that fat has nine calories per gram and you're not eating very much fat and we actually asked all of our participants to tattoo this on their forearm fat has nine calories per gram because that means animal fat beef fat pork fat chicken fat fish fat it means oils corn oil safflower oil olive oil extra virgin olive oil nine calories per gram so on to lose weight we're going to keep those very low but carbohydrate has only four calories in a gram and so for all the people who are afraid of carbohydrate it's a really low calorie food which is why in Japan before McDonald's arrived the diet was rice based huge amounts of rice and noodles and they were the skinniest longest live people on the planet okay so the first mechanism the reason people lose weight is because the foods are high in fiber and they're very low in fat people just tend to eat less even though they think they're eating more this is a technique called indirect calorimetry the patients come in and we put a plastic bubble over their face and shoulders and what we're doing is measuring how much oxygen you're consuming minute by minute and how much carbon dioxide you're putting out and with some really simple arithmetic that shows me how fast you're burning calories so the patients come in and they haven't had breakfast yet and they've got a really low metabolism and in fact they'll say you don't even need to measure I can tell you I don't have a metabolism at all when I was 16 I could eat anything but now I just look at food and I gain weight so we measure their resting metabolic rate and it is low and then they have breakfast and what we see is that over the next three hours or more their metabolism rises and that's because you're absorbing nutrients you're metabolizing those nutrients is you're building a body heat you're using more oxygen to do all of that and that will continue but then you begin a completely plant-based diet comeback in lie down on the same table we put the same thing over here your face and we're measuring again your met metabolic rate and what we discover is that your metabolism has increased not a lot but it's increased about 16 percent but 16 percent increase after breakfast after lunch after dinner 365 days a year that's another big reason why people on plant-based diets lose weight so so reason number one is that they're just not eating as much food even though they think they are the second reason is they're actually burning calories just a little bit faster it's kind of like setting the idol in your car just 16% faster so you're burning through fuel so why does that happen so what I'm suggesting is that their metabolism had been artificially suppressed before they were eating a lot of fatty foods and that interfered with their metabolism well how could that be let me walk you through this at Pennington Biomedical Research Center this is in Baton Rouge Louisiana researchers tested a high fat diet 50% fat in volunteers for just three days and what they discovered is that their mitochondrial biogenesis was suppressed let me tell you what I mean by that you know your cells they have mitochondria in them you remember this from high school biology those mitochondria are your little burners they are there to burn calories they turn sugar into energy or fat into energy and the number of mitochondria you have is not constant it can change if you need more energy your body can make more mitochondria if you need less your body can coalesce the mitochondria and start getting rid of them so the point of this experiment was they brought in individuals and for three days they gave them extra fat and their body stopped making so many mitochondria what does that mean it means their their ability to burn energy to produce energy diminishes so okay so this is a cell say this is a muscle well there's some mitochondria you got lots of them but there's something else there there's fat it's building up no doctors hate words like fat it's got one syllable three letters so we'll call it interim io cellular lipid and now we're on to something fat it intra means inside Myo means muscle cellular means cellular lipid means fat intra my Orsolya lipid is fat inside the cell so I'm going out to lunch I'm gonna have a ham sandwich with extra cheese and lots of mayo and some of that fat gets into the cell it starts building up inside myself when you get the fat out of your cells it boosts your after-meal calorie burn and so what we think is happening is that a vegan diet simply boost your metabolic burns so that you can burn calories a little bit better okay so there's another possibility you know how in your intestinal tract there are bacteria there that's the microbiome and the foods you eat will affect your microbiome in various ways and researchers have started to think hmm maybe some of the products of those bacteria are getting into our bloodstream and they're poisoning our body here's here's what it is you see at the top of that slide that's the the inside of your intestinal tract and you see there's a blood vessel passing by at the bottom and bacteria produce what are called endotoxins and the endotoxin made by the bacteria can sneak through into your bloodstream and the question is could fatty foods make that more likely to happen so that the endotoxin is getting into my blood and it's damaging my metabolism in some kind of way and that is what we the fact think is happening so this was the study done at Virginia Tech University and they had the idea that a high-fat diet might actually disrupt that intestinal barrier and that that in turn could cause the endotoxin to enter the bloodstream or fat might actually escort the endotoxin indirectly but in either case it disrupts your cells is this true well they fed individuals of 50 five percent fat diet for five days and what they showed is before the high-fat diet their endotoxin there was not a lot of endotoxin in their blood and after the high fat diet there was a lot of endotoxin in the blood so this proves the first part of that the bacterial products are getting into the blood and is this goofing up my metabolism yes it is the two bars on the Left that's before the high-fat diet when you eat a meal your metabolism will bounce right up that's normal that should happen the second two bars that's after the high fat diet and what you discover is that your metabolism doesn't bounce up very much you get the idea so what the researchers are saying is you're reading all these fatty foods and we think my body will just get rid of them as they're going through your digestive tract they appear to be causing endotoxins from the bacteria to get into your circulation that poisons your metabolism that's working against you so why does it low fat vegan diet cause people to lose weight well because you're eating less food thinking reading more and your metabolism is improved because you're getting rid of these problems okay so in 2003 the National Institutes of Health gave my research team a grant to try to test this approach for type 2 diabetes and it was a randomized trial comparing a low-fat vegan diet to what I'm gonna call the ad a guidelines and the low-fat vegan diet means no animal products keeping oils really low and the ad a guidelines that I'm describing here we're back when we began this the American Diabetes Association really said for most people with diabetes they need to cut calories as to lose weight you've just got to cut calories if you eat 2,000 calories a day we're gonna cut you down to 1500 that will help you lose weight and you need to keep carbohydrate fairly steady throughout the day don't ever have a big carb fest that was those were sort of the rules so that was our control group it was a 22 week study so call it what five months and when your follow up and to cut to the chase the test that we use to track blood sugar control is hemoglobin a1c or just a1c for short and on this slide I'm showing the a1c values for the people who made no changes in their medication or anything else and it's if you have diabetes we want to keep it below seven our people were not below seven they were around eight to start and the red line here is the ad a group and they did very well they dropped about zero point four absolute percentage points which is great but the blue line is the people on the plant-based diet and as you can see they dropped by about one point two absolute percentage points or even a little bit more and this was without any medication change about any exercises just from healthy eating now we track them for an additional year and there was some give back where you can see they started to lose some of their benefit the ad a group ended up really where they started with the vegan group there was some give back but they still stayed better than where they had been and you familiar with LDL cholesterol low-density lipoprotein bad cholesterol it won't surprise you it drops very very predictably when people are not eating cholesterol anymore which is only in animal products and when they're not eating animal fat and now when we tracked body weight we saw that both groups lost weight and there wasn't a significant difference between the two groups however what was noteworthy is that when we tracked our people for a year and a half the vegan group lost slightly more weight than the than the ad a group despite the fact that they didn't have any calorie restriction at all the people on in the ad a group were told you've got to eat 500 calories a day less they sat down with the dietician who gave them a menu that added up to not enough food to make them satisfied and you have to eat that way until you reach your goal weight which for most people is never and it gets really frustrating right about Wednesday you're ready to eat the sofa and with the vegan group they were told to eat pancakes eat spaghetti eat all you want and they lose more weight so we don't use calorie restrictions at all for anybody we just we get we encourage people to follow a healthier quality of diet and that takes care of it okay let me share with you a couple of experiences this is Vance Vance came into our study he was a policeman in Washington and he said I know all about diabetes because it was up and down his family tree said this diabetes means you could lose a leg you could go blind Vance's father was dead at age 30 Vance was 31 when he was diagnosed and he was in his late 30s when it came to see us but he started the diet he lost 60 pounds over the course of about a year he stopped his diabetes medications and his a1c had been nine and a half which is terrible and it fell to five point three which is completely normal and I want to tell you that when I got his results this was back 14 15 years ago when diabetes was considered a one-way street once you're diabetic you will always be diabetic and yet here was a guy in front of me who was on no medications for his diabetes and he didn't have a high blood sugar he could go into any clinic in the world and they wouldn't diagnosed him as as having this disease and the question was can I tell him that he doesn't have diabetes anymore and I have to say we had over time we have come to see that this can happen it's and it's not a rare thing that a person can actually get over there over there their diabetes and by the way when I was asking if I could share his experience with you he said make sure you tell everybody that my erectile dysfunction went away as well now let me say a word about that the guy goes into the doctor's office he says doctor how do I put this I have I got I got problem with with my nature and the doctor would give him a prescription for viagra now let's go back for a minute though erectile dysfunction is not caused by performance anxiety in a middle-aged man it's caused by a lack of blood flow because a man's sexual anatomy is a hydraulic system that requires good blood flow for it to work properly it was obviously devised on a Monday because things are going wrong with it all the time but if you don't have an adequate blood flow it just will not work so he's guys in his mid-50s say he's got a thrust cross sclerosis in his coronary arteries meaning he's headed for a heart attack he's got it the same thing in his brain the carotid czar starting to get narrow it happens in the arteries all over his body and so sexual dysfunction in a man should never be treated with a viagra prescription or anything else without letting the patient know that in all likelihood he has serious atherosclerosis and will have a heart attack or a stroke within fairly few years if he does not make bigger changes than this that person's got to be counseled on a healthy plant-based diet if he smokes you gotta have a serious discussion about that this is a heart attack waiting to happen and you see these commercials about on TV with you know you could sit in two tubs and all this kind of stuff you know your seven-year-old daughter comes in the in the kitchen says what's an erection lasting more than four hours you know this is the world that we live in but this is atherosclerosis and should be treated as such okay Nancy was in the same study she lost about 40 pounds in the same way she stopped her diabetes medications her a one C fell to six point eight which is good but she illustrates a point she still has diabetes so not everyone is going to have their diabetes go away but it improves you can dramatically reduce the risk of any kind of complications of diabetes but treat it right away if a person has had diabetes for 20 25 30 years the likelihood of making it completely go away is reduced because the beta cells of the pancreas are just not producing insulin as much as they used to okay but she did have another interesting experience she came running into our research center to say I was cooking spaghetti which by the way if you have diabetes that alone is amazing and she she had rheumatoid arthritis and if any of you have rheumatoid arthritis you know that whoever makes those vacuum-packed jars for spaghetti sauce and thinks they are sadists you can't get them open but you just crack the jar open and she poured out the the sauce and she realized her joints stopped hurting what was that about well that's a whole other topic but I wrote a book in 1998 called foods that fight pain because I found that very common kinds of pain like menstrual pain or migraines or rheumatoid arthritis can be affected by food and inflammatory conditions like rheumatoid arthritis it's an autoimmune condition where the body is making antibodies to something that has entered and now those antibodies that are attacking the synovial membranes that line the joints well what is that antigen it could be dairy it could be other things the most common one is dairy and when it's gone from the diet many people's arthritis improves or just goes away okay don't take this on faith the patient can test it out for themselves and they can bring the suspect foods in and out of the diet and pretty soon they'll see the ones that are affecting them okay this is my most important slide I want to walk you through the cause of type 2 diabetes if you are a caregiver when you're explaining to an individual why we use a plant-based diet I would suggest that you take an 8 nap by 11 piece of paper and draw this out for the patient and hand it to them with your phone number this is a muscle cell the reason I'm showing you a muscle cell is that's where glucose is going the sugar that's in your blood is trying to get into your muscles it's like gasoline trying to go into your gas tank to power your engine glucose is gasoline for your cells if it can't get into the cells it just circulates in the blood and causes trouble so there's glucose up on the upper left and it's trying to get into the cell it can get in there with the help of a key which is insulin the insulin is made in the pancreas and like a key in a lock the insulin attaches to those red receptors and when that happens it signals the insulin to come in through those little channels and it goes right into the cell and that's all normal now if a person has type 2 diabetes they've got glucose they've got insulin they got insulin receptors all that is completely normal what is not normal is that arrow that's that signaling process that insulin signaling is not working it's like putting the key in a lock and the engine just won't start or your front door lock won't open because somebody put chewing gum in your lock the lock is gummed up there's nothing wrong with your key so what am I gonna do well if you look inside the cell you see our old enemy in Treme Oh Cellular lipid goofing us up again and that can be from dairy fat beef fat fish oil olive oil extra virgin olive oil extra extra virgin olive oil doesn't care it doesn't matter how much you paid for the bottle and whether it came from Tuscany or not it gets inside the cell VAT it very quickly after the meal and it interferes with insulins action so Oh doctor that's why you want me to follow a vegan diet because how much animal fat is there in a vegan diet there's than any and that's why you're teaching me non oil cooking techniques because over time that fats gonna start to disappear so let me share with you a study that was done by Jerry Schulman and kit Petersen at Yale University this was a groundbreaking study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine back in 1994 I'm sorry 2004 what they did is they brought in 26 healthy people they didn't have diabetes they did a glucose tolerance test that's where you drink 75 grams of this syrupy goo and then they stick you in the arm every half hour and track your glucose levels and your insulin levels and based on the results of this some of the people were normal they were insulin sensitive some of the people were not they were already insulin resistant and so then what they did as they tested these groups the insulin sensitive controls the healthy people were compared with the insulin resistant people and they picked folks who had a family history of diabetes either parent or grandparent they were young 28 26 they were not heavy the insulin resistant people slightly heavier but nobody there was overweight there a one sea levels were completely normal nobody had diabetes but then they sent them into an MRI magnetic resonance imaging into it with mr spectroscopy you can look inside the muscle cells and there you see something very troubling each dot here is a person this is how much intra myau cellular lipid was building up in their muscle cells and that's on the left is the controls who are healthy on the right is the insulin resistant people what you're seeing is that they they're young there's any they're healthy they don't have diabetes nobody even mentioned that word but they've got fat building up inside their cells and then their mitochondria are getting impaired they're not working as well we're not gonna have diabetes for another 10 years or 15 years but the process has started when they're young and thin it starts for many kids when they're in high school okay this is making sense right so inside that cell what they do is be on a diet that cleans that fat out and the earlier the sooner you do that the better off you're going to be okay all right now I'd like to talk to you about your car insurance GEICO's national headquarters is about four blocks from my office and back in about 2006 I was talking with their health director who said dr. Barnard I've got 2,500 people in this building we are self-insured we got people on statins we've got people on insulin we are hemorrhaging healthcare costs what if we do your program at Geico said fabulous let's do it as a study so what we did is we did a randomized or not a random start we did a comparison of this facility which is in the Washington DC area to another facility in Fredericksburg Virginia and all we did was we asked the cafeteria manager to serve vegan food in addition to whatever else they were serving they had to have it available and the second thing was anybody who wanted to try the diet could sign up and we would give them every week Lunch and Learn or support group or cooking class whatever you want to call it they came in once a week at lunch that was the whole deal and it worked really really well so Geico said you know we got more Geico places than that let's do it in 10 different cities so we did and we've including Dallas Texas and Macon Georgia and San Diego in all kinds of places and I have to say for some of the cafeteria managers it was a little bit of a new idea for them what can I say it took him a little while to figure out that vegan means don't have the bacon and cheese but anyway what you would expect to happen happened which is that if people did not go on the diet they didn't lose any weight if they did go on the diet they lost weight really really well the hemoglobin a1c and people with diabetes just dropped and it has become very very predictable that this will happen now I have to say our research instructors kept coming back to the office each week and they were just seeing the praises of the people at Geico you know they're so enthusiastic they're so into this they're doing a great job except for two of them there's Hillary and there's Bruce they're the youngest people in the study they come every single week to the to the classes but they sit in the back of the room and they don't pay any attention to the to what's going on all they do is chatter and they pass notes back and forth and gaze into each other's eyes and they distract everybody else I don't see why they keep coming and every week I kept hearing about Hillary and Bruce being these bad participants well you can misjudge people and our instructors misjudged Hillary and Bruce they did distract people and they did talk a lot but what they were talking about was what foods they were gonna pick up at the store on the way home and how they were gonna convince her parents to go vegan with them how they were going to have a vegan Thanksgiving for all their friends they were making their shopping lists and they were really into it and a year later Bruce sent me this picture Hillary's lost 85 pounds Bruce has lost 100 pounds and I want to tell you that when Bruce sent me this picture he said you know when you have trouble losing weight and you're not like all the success stories that you see on TV you think you don't think there's somewhere with a diet you think there's something wrong with you they do well what's wrong with me well maybe I don't have the willpower that I should have maybe with my bad childhood maybe I'm just kind of a worm I don't know and it bleeds into every other aspect of your life it's not just that you having trouble losing weight maybe I'm not such a hot employee maybe I'm not a very good parent this sense of failure pervades your whole life and the board diets you fail at them the worse it gets and then suddenly you realize it wasn't you it was a diet that said starve it off don't eat carbohydrates all these things that have nothing to do with human nature or human biology and when you're suddenly putting in your body the fuel that you were actually designed for it's like putting the right fuel into your car if you've been putting diesel in your car and it's the exhaust is terrible and the ride is rough and you suddenly put in the fuel that is really designed for like unleaded and everything sorts itself out that's what happens when you put the fuel in that your body really was hoping you would do and when you can let that weight melt away and let your health come back then you get a sense of success that pervades other aspects of your life maybe I can do some stuff maybe there things I can do and one of the things they discovered they could do was exercise once they lost that weight they realized they wanted they felt energetic and they had never exercised before but now they took it up and Bruce sent me this picture the day they ran their first two half marathon um by the way when we're speaking of diabetes you know that diabetes increases the risk of eye problems and kidney problems and it can damage the circulation to your legs and your feet but it also attacks the brain this is a study done in Japan where individuals were tested to see if they had diabetes or not and those who did had double the risk of Alzheimer's compared to those who didn't and happily the of Pro to Alzheimer's is surprisingly similar to the approach to diabetes this is in Chicago at the chicago health and aging project they brought in individuals who were healthy and they tracked what they were eating and they wanted to see if foods could affect brain function and let me share with you that the foods they first picked on were things that I knew all about as a kid growing up in Fargo North Dakota anybody been there seen the movie okay my mom had five kids we'd wake up to this smell of bacon wafting up and we come down my mother would be taking a fork and she'd pull the bacon strips out of the frying pan and put him on a paper towel to kind of cool down and then when all the bacon was out of the pan she had this hot grease in the pan you don't want to throw that away that's good bacon grease so she would lift that hot pan and she'd pour it into a jar to save the grease did your mom do this too and the the jar did not go in the refrigerator she just put it on the shelf because when bacon grease cools down what happens to it it solidifies and that's a sign that it's loaded with saturated fat and the number one source of saturated fat is not bacon it's actually dairy products meats number two so which Sakana gross some of the people ate relatively little saturated fat 13 grams a day some ate about twice as much about 25 when you look at the Alzheimer's risk of these two groups dramatically different eating more saturated fat would more than double the risk of Alzheimer's the same is true with trans fats used in a lot of snack foods and what we think is going on is that the bad fat pushes your cholesterol level up and the higher your cholesterol that's the further out you are on the right of the slide the higher your risk of Alzheimer's the lesson is whatever is bad for the heart is bad for the brain smoking is bad for the heart eating lard is bad for the heart being sedentary is bad for the heart all those things are bad for the brain too the good news is that when you are helping your heart when you are attacking your diabetes with a healthy diet your brain says I'm so glad you're doing this because puts Alzheimer's a little bit more out of your reach okay so a healthy diet fruits grains vegetables legumes now when you prescribe this to a patient they might say wait a minute doc where am I gonna get my protein are you sick of that question well patients will ask it and let me just walk you through some numbers because people imagine at least when I was a kid this we grew up with the idea that you've got meat and then you got vegetables but that the protein is in the meat and the vegetables might have vitamins or fiber but they don't have any protein okay the average person might eat roughly 2,000 calories a day and the government would say a woman needs about 46 grams of protein a man 56 so what if I ate as an experiment 2,000 calories of just broccoli not that you would ever do this but as an experiment if all you ate on a day was just broccoli but you ate your normal meal size you would get 146 grams of pure protein just from broccoli next day let's do it with lentils just lentils but 2,000 calories worth you're now getting a hundred and fifty seven grams of pure protein well hopefully you're not doing that but what if you had some broccoli some lentils some rice some fruits other foods what you discover is that you're getting more than enough complete protein all the essential amino acids in the proportions your body needs without even thinking about it so in other words forget protein it is a non-issue calcium is an issue but a really easy one people think of calcium is coming from what dairy products milk products well the cow does not make calcium calcium is an element it's in the ground so when grass grows its roots pull up the calcium and it gets into the grass and the cow eats the leaves of the grass and some of it gets into the milk and you will absorb about 30 percent of the calcium in the in the milk 32 percent to be exact wait wait let's take out the middleman what if I'm eating that hopefully on grass that things that come out of your directly and maybe it's broccoli maybe it's brussel sprouts or kale or college or something like that and you're eating that's what nature thought you were gonna eat and we have the ability to absorb it in a bigger fraction than we can absorb from milk it varies so some plants like spinach or kind of selfish they have a very low absorption fraction but others very very high okay now vitamin b12 very important very easy but very important vitamin b12 is needed for healthy nerves and healthy blood and it's not made by animals or by plants it's made by bacteria and some people will say prior to the advent of modern hygiene the bacteria in the soil or on the foods that we would would eat might give us the 2.4 micrograms that we need maybe maybe not meat eaters will get some b12 because the inter intestinal tract of a cow there are bacteria that make b12 and some of it gets in the meat and some gets in the dairy however to absorb that b12 you have to have first of all you have to have stomach acid to pull the b12 off the protein and then you need something called intrinsic factor to absorb it a lot of people over 50 are not making stomach acid very well and if you're on an acid blocker that's for sure and if you're on metformin that interferes would be to all of absorption too so most of the people who end up low in b12 are not people on a vegan diet they're people who are on medications or over 50 but if you're on a vegan diet you're not getting animal products as a source you must supplement b12 it's at every drugstore every health food store just take the smallest amount you you can the amount you actually need is 2.4 micrograms it's in everyone at a vitamin you ever took it's supplemented in lots of foods but you should supplement just to be sure ok and by now your friends when you go home and speak with them about this diet they will say what are you talking about human beings are carnivores we're meat eaters we all grew up with meat eaters and let me put a question mark on that it is true that when you look at the caves of France and Spain you do see these optimistic drawings of people who thought maybe today we'll have a successful hunt but if you look a little bit more broadly at our grade eight cousins what you discover is they're not eating ice cream in fact they eat fruit and all kinds of things that they can pull with their hands and with with very few exceptions they don't eat meat very very few exceptions I'm going to suggest that maybe people are really herbivores and to help me prove that I have three scientific tests do you know the dental tests the dental tests you wait for your cat to yawn and you look in your cat's mouth and what you see are these razor blades that they used to kill prey and to remove the hide and the muscles and then you stumble into the bathroom and look in the mirror at your own teeth and what you discover is that your canine teeth are no longer than your incisors and that change occurred at least three and a half million years ago okay that is an herbivorous mouth do you know the bunny test no hey bunny - you take a bunny and you put the bunny in front of your cat and what you discover is that your cat who may never have seen a bunny and might be only six or eight months old the the brain in the cat is hardwired to devour that bunny you put the very same bunny in front of a baby or a toddler and what they will say is bunny not in a million years where their brain send a signal saying I shall eat him and and in fact in fact if a cat is walking down the sidewalk and they see a bird flopping around because the birds broken his wing the cat is gonna think how propecia s-- food has come to me and they will pounce on him and eat him but you could be the most hard-hearted human being in the world you could be a lobbyist if you see if you see a burden flopping out of a broken wing do you ever think that give me some bread and mayo this is gonna really work out fine no you're an herbivore this just doesn't happen to your brain is not hardwired that way the third okay the third scientific test do you know the box test no you take a box and the box had a computer or a camera or some kind of electronics in it and in the bottom of the box is something called silica gel and what's that for keep it dry right well the makers of silica gel are very wise observers of human behavior they have written three words on every single packet do not heat what does this tell us by nature we are herbivores but we put any darn thing in our mouth unless you specifically tell us not to and that's what's happened if you see what kids are eating these days it's it should have a label saying do not eat all right so this is a carnivore that is not a carnivore on the left has big ears to track where prey is I can hear them in the distance you know dogs they can they can hear frequencies that are outside of human here at you know I'm talking about and their nose is is so powerful that they can tell where prey has been long after prey has left they contract prey they're so good they can detect explosives at the airport and in fact I've got to tell you they can detect a banana that you brought back from your trip to from to Costa Rica that you forgot was in your luggage they're really good now human beings have cute noses and cute little ears but they don't really can't really track prey you can't really smell where things have been and that's okay because you don't have to sneak up on a strawberry it's just like really simple you know if you're an herbivore you don't need that kind of sensation but your eyes unlike a dog run like a cat you have color vision that is very acute so you can recognize beta carotene across the room it's orange you can recognize the lycopene across their mess and tomatoes but these are antioxidants the anthocyanins that give grapes and blueberries their color their color these are antioxidants at your brain sieze and and interprets as positive and we bring them into our diet unlike your cat who's looking for motion because your cat's carnivore okay make sense sorry of course we now we take those colors we put them in an M&Ms bag but you get the idea alright so I asked the paleoanthropologists Richard Leakey how did people become carnivores and what he told me is Neil we are not carnivores we have never been carnivores but the Stone Age gave us arrowheads and axes and the ability to kill prey so an animal who's not particularly fast doesn't have sharp teeth can eat like a carnivore but we have priests donate coronary arteries so when we talk about influencing decision-making in ourselves in our families let me give you a few important truths logic plays almost no role in human behavior what makes a lot of difference is for when I'm picking up my breakfast is the culture that I grew up in what what we ate are noise like advertising and maybe some ideas like wishful thinking and money and what I'm addicted to or something like that that's what determines what we have for breakfast and so you're explaining to somebody very logically about what they ought to be eating and here's what happens in their brain okay for neuroanatomists you know this is true you get an idea in the brain at the idea tron issues the idea is like if I stop eating meat maybe that'll be good for my coronary arteries might be good for the environment maybe the animals would like not having their throat slit - this is an interesting idea but as soon as you get these ideas they irritate the familiar and the familiar events then triggers that don't do a tarry gland which then sends into the brain ignore fins and the ignore phones wipe out the idea and you will have this experience when you talk to people about a plant-based diet within about 30 seconds this whole process will have completed and out from the mouth will come where do you get your protein and they are rejecting this threat to the familia okay all right so if you think all right I can I can overcome this I'd like to start the diet here's how you doing we break it into two steps I've never seen anyone unable to do it step one check out the possibilities don't take anything else don't think anything out of your diet just take a week to see what you could eat take a piece of paper and write breakfast lunch dinner snack on the paper and take seven days and fill it in with plant-based options you'd like to try so for example if you never tasted almond milk on your cornflakes and it's always been a whole milk now is the time to buy it and try it if you haven't had oatmeal since you're a kid let's go pick some up and see if we still like it and then you do the same for lunch and try different things and you try it also at restaurants see if there are sorry see if there are foods that you might like at your favorite Italian place and the answer is of course they've got things go to a Mexican place and they'll make you bean burritos and veggie fajitas Chinese restaurants have lots of choices of course a rice and vegetables and tofu dishes and then if you're going to a sushi bar they will be more than happy to make you a vegetable sushi subway we'll be more than happy to pile it high with all the veggies and Taco Bell is not the pinnacle of culinary art but it is more they're more than happy to give you a bean burrito and hold the cheese that'll be plant-based and fine seven days you got it down now take three weeks and do it a three week test drive and during these three weeks make it all vegan all the time with no exception and two things will happen at the end of three weeks you'll discover you're physically changed your health is better the second thing is your tastes are changing and you didn't expect that but if you haven't had cheese and thinks for about three weeks you discover you kind of can leave it behind and you're liking the taste of the new foods that come in and you three weeks is really about all it takes we have some resources that I'd like to share with you we have our 21 day vegan kickstart program you can go to this address PCRM org it's totally free and every day you'll get an email with menus and recipes and cooking videos we have a free app for iPhones also Androids and it's in English it's in Spanish it's in Mandarin we have a Japanese program and also a program for people from the Indian subcontinent with all Indian ingredients let me brag about two books that this cookbook just came out and I want to tip my hat to Drina Burton who did these wonderful recipes for my reversing diabetes cookbook and on December 24th I have the skinniest smallest shortest cheapest book anyone ever wrote called the vegan starter kit and I'm releasing this because I want to have something that a person can read in less than an hour about how to get started so you'll see that on Amazon now please order 25 copies and give away 24 of them to people who need this the last thing that I just want to say is I hope you find this helpful but more important than anything is to spread the word because most people still don't know how foods can help revolutionize their health and the more we spread the word the more lives will save thank you very much [Applause] thank you [Applause] all right thank you for a fantastic talk as well as very entertaining I have to say those slides are great we'll open up the floor for questions for about the next 20 minutes I see one here and hold your hands up high because I know it's hard to see with us with the light shining in do it before we do can I bring back for an up to the state I was talking to Bob before just before I came on and he shared a story with me that I'd like him to share with you if you don't mind Bob it's an honor to be here with someone that saved my life my name is Bob Blackburn and two years ago I was 330 pounds and I was diagnosed as a type-2 diabetic at the VA hospital in Hampton in the last two years I've lost 130 pounds they took diabetes out of my record January edition I'm not a doctor I'm not a PhD not an MD I have three letters after my name MT stands to love my toes I came into this world with ten digits in my hands and turn on my feet and I'm leaving with them [Applause] this isn't easy it's not easy to I'm an Italian kid from Boston I put olive oil on breakfast cereal I've never used a tablespoon of anything it's three trips around the zoo Katie if it wasn't for dr. Ballard seriously I I probably would be like my father dead at 53 I was 53 years old when I got diagnosed nice oldest son was 14 my father died at 53 I was 14 reality was real if you know what I mean I came home diagnosed I cried a friend of mine John Gunn see who's a fellow that I had knew who had lost a lot of weight even plant beliefs and I called him I said what do I do he says Google dr. bond I like who's that there he is I went I literally downloaded his book the reverse and diabetes if you haven't read it read it if you haven't prescribed it do it because it's it's written for real people I read the book literally twice that night woke up the next morning and I started eating low-fat plant-based vegan diet but ever that was I can promise you if I was ever to write a blog that would be the unlikely diabetic I'm sorry the unlikely vegan because if it mode or plaid or crud or whatever I ate it I was a United States Marine and a professional wrestler [Applause] what I am now is a non-diabetic grateful human being to that man right there [Applause] I want to salute you you know people come in and they give of their time as research participants and and so forth but when a person has actually gone through this and lived it with whatever fears or trepidation you may have and then you come out the other end and see that this works and you're willing to share your experience with other people thank you so much for doing that [Applause] my older brother started following the John McDougall approach and and then stopped and switch to the keto diet and he's convinced my sister to do so as well and I wonder whether you have any advice for how to convince someone who is following the keto diet because they're sure they cannot follow a plant-based diet and counteract diabetic yeah effect symptoms okay it's a great question you know we have in Washington I think you have them here are these little insects cicadas they're in the trees and they kind of buzz and then they go into the ground and you don't hear them for another 17 years I think it is and they come back again while they're in the ground they write books about low carbohydrate diets and then they come back and it started out it was called Atkins and then it was called South Beach and now it's called keto it in some ways a ketogenic diet might have been better than whatever diet they had been following in the past if the diet was a lot of sodas and junk they might be taking some of those things out and that can be helpful also carbohydrate is about half of what people eat so if people eliminate half of what they eat they will lose weight unfortunately they're eliminating a good half if it's rice and beans and sweet potatoes and healthy foods like that over the long run people following that kind of approach have two particular problems one is that normally cholesterol levels should fall with any kind of weight loss except on Kido on a ketogenic diet many people will lose weight as their body fat diminishes but about 1 in 3 as their cholesterol go up sometimes quite dramatically which is no surprise because you're eating a lot of meat the other thing is just overall mortality is much higher in low-carb dieters than in other kind of dietary diets so it's kind of an engaging diet it's got four letters sounds kind of sexy but it's not something that we recommend thanks so much for being here today I'm a type 1 diabetic and two quick questions one you know when you talk about keto type ones they always go to low carb and that's meat and cheese and so adding fruits and beans can be a bit of a challenge above some advice on that and also there's the question of just how vegan do you have to be to make it work like can I be 95 percent or 92 percent can I have an egg a month I mean or is a hundred percent the way you really need to go to see the benefits okay two great questions um first of all for type 1 diabetes we recommend exactly the same diet for type 2 it will not get you off your insulin because because as you know because your pancreas isn't making any insulin at all and so you'll still need some but you get two benefits the first is that it reduces the amount of insulin that you need to inject usually by about 30% with it varies a lot from person to person and the other thing is that all the complications of type 1 diabetes like type 2 the serious complications relate to your vasculature the blood vessels of the eyes or of the lower legs or the kidneys and so you don't want any cholesterol in your diet you want a really baby your your arteries and all the all the blood vessels that branch from them so you don't want animal fat you don't want cholesterol and when when people eat a plant-based diet they can live a normal life and they can expect to have a normal life and minimize the risk of complications with a ketogenic diet you really can't say that so your other question was how vegan do you have to be any step a person makes is a good step everything that you do in this direction is going to be a good good thing there are a couple of values of just not having animal products at all and the first is that for reasons I can't explain when people eliminate animal products completely they do better than a person who eliminates at ninety percent it's a little bit like if I have a patient with COPD and there were a three pack a day smoker and they're down to just five cigarettes a day but they still COFF and then when they finally just aren't smoking anymore somehow they're just better and when a person is having a little bit of lb8 a little bit of Sam and all things somehow their cholesterol and things just never quite settle down the other thing which might even be bigger is that if a person is including the foods that cause their problem in the first day I don't mean type one diabetes but type two in particular when animal products remain an occasional part of the diet we never forget our taste for them and so that we always just kind of keep coming back to them and sometimes that tends to increase but like as with smoking or alcohol or other things when you just say I think I'm gonna put a fence between me and net not have it anymore it's easier to maintain healthy diet so those those are the things that we have observed thank you so much just for speaking and I did appreciate the idea of the logic not working because I feel like I'm very logic based and that's how I ended up here however my family is not especially my parents my mom is extremely she is like a long laundry list of issues including diabetes and one of the things that I've wondered that I've ran into is that her doctors follow the ATA guidelines how in the world do you break that misconception that the a.da guidelines are the ones to follow especially when there's that emotional tide to literally she call herself the meat and potatoes gal because I'm also starting to see my grandparents who also have diabetes having some of those memory problems and stuff like that like how do you break that barrier if there's like you know like there's the logic is already not there and they they're having hard time trying okay terrific question and I think as you were speaking many people are nodding their head saying your family's like my family a couple of things the American Diabetes Association's guidelines have changed and they continue to evolve and they now do include a healthy plant-based diet as one of the options so in fact the a da was the first the first organization to publish our data in 2006 in diabetes care that's where the trial that I described was published and I spoke at a DA so they're very open to ideas like this and they they would encourage people to follow exactly the diet that I have described and with family members who are a little reluctant the big suggestion I have is to always focus on the short term like why don't we try this as a family for three weeks no no pressure beyond that but let's do this together and everyone gets a copy of what the health or Forks Over knives and they watch it together and they had decided all right darn it we'll try it and after about a three-week period of an experiment then it becomes easier to think about doing it on a more longer long-term basis the other thing I would suggest is if you give family members a book don't just give him a book I I discovered this with my mom my mom had a high cholesterol level and I'd give her books and you know books I'd written you know and like she would never you know like you you know you can tell when a book hasn't been read it's like sitting on the coffee table exactly where I put it six months ago and you know finally by the way my mother did change to a vegan diet and it dropped her cholesterol dramatically but what I learned is that when you give people a book you've got to put two post-it notes in somewhere and you write on the cover of another post-it notes saying dear mom I thought of you when I was reading between pages one hundred forty hundred fifty and because she goes the post-it note and she reads it like six times like what it may be it was before that and you could do this with a DVD also right after about minute thirty five between there in an hour mom that was you she will watch that DVD eight times you know and then she'll call you say what do you mean about the post I say mom I just love you so much I wanted to seduce you into watching the darn thing so never give a book without opposed to know I have type-2 diabetes but my numbers 5.9 but I'm still a 5.5 but I'm still overweight but my question is I'm suffering from inflammation throughout my body and they're diagnosing me with three new autonomic diseases do I just use your reverse diabetes book or do I look like inflammation okay first of all I'm sorry to hear that you're dealing with these these challenges and you're not alone there are other people who are who are as well and I hope all goes super well I should also say that nothing that I am discussing here takes the place of having good diagnostic care from your own personal physician and looking at what could be aggravating these things and so you want to make sure that those bases are covered that said many many people who have type-2 diabetes have lots of other things and including inflammatory conditions and what we do is we start with a low-fat vegan diet that eliminates some of the main inflammatory triggers like dairy products or perhaps eggs or meat but Daria's is a really really a big one and for many people that's kind of all they need to do is a low-fat vegan diet but if a person has a condition like rheumatoid arthritis or Sjogren's disease or even asthma these are autoimmune conditions there are sometimes other dietary triggers that can be bugging them too and so we use an elimination diet where we take all those triggers out for example like citrus fruit totally healthy for for almost everybody except if that's your trigger then you can't have citrus so we have an organized way of doing an elimination diet that you can try but I would first just start with just a regular low-fat vegan diet and see how it goes if you want to see that nation died you'll see it in my book foods that fight pain and I also put an updated version in a book I wrote your so ago called the cheese trap which I wrote for all of my research participants who say that one food I really miss is cheese so um there's reasons why and you'll see the elimination diet there too does that answer your question there's a food called a book called foods that fight pain foods that fight pain it's come to Kimble you came out like 20 years ago and the cheese trap came out a couple of years ago so anyway I hope you have a chance to pick them out a librarian and see if they help but help you I want to thank you for being here and thank you for really for writing a 21 day kickstart book I read in April 2012 and was able to keep my gallbladder I was having lots of painful gallstone pain and against my doctor's wishes I changed my diet was able to keep my gallbladder because I don't like having surgery one solid vegan four and a half years that kind of fell off the wagon about two years it kind of became a dessert vegetarian and I don't feel as good and muffin top us back so I'm today I'm hoping to get back on track but my question is I also had started incorporating juicing I know fiber is very important but I kind of wanted your take on what your thought is like having a juice a day or doing like a short you know juicing fast because it kind of gives your digestive system arrest yeah about juicing I think juicing is fine some people will say wait a minute aren't you better off with the eating the carrot instead of carrot juice or the orange instead of orange juice and that's true you know the fiber and pulp are valuable but on the other hand for many people when that where they're juicing they're juicing in addition to other things that they're eating they're really boosting their their their plant food intake for some folks it's really kind of like a medicine so I think juicing is a-ok I have two quick questions for you first what is what is your opinion okay great question for long-term fasting many people can benefit from that I am convinced I've seen people where their inflammation is kind of kind of like what you're asking about where their inflammation is off the scale and somehow when when people just aren't eating they do better and things calm down but it's dangerous and is not something to be done without really good supervision and there's a place in Santa Rosa California called True North where there's a doctor there in the building it will see you every day on your water fast and we'll make sure that you're okay it's not something to be just done casually intermittent fasting is something where you can eat less food for a couple of days each week that's safer and I think it's perfectly fine and if you enjoy it I think it's okay if it's being used as a substitute for a healthy diet like I'm going to indulge five days and try to make up for it on two other days I wouldn't do it like that and I'm also convinced that if a person is on a really healthful diet they don't really have to fast at all I fasted yesterday between 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. and that's that's kind of where I leave it from myself hi dr. Barnard okay do we have any carbohydrate restriction no not with regard to quantity but we do encourage people to well I guess two things one is if you are using your carbohydrate intake to calibrate your insulin dose then you might have to count how much you consume just like anybody else but our hope obviously is to get you to be able to use less and less insulin and hopefully none at all so you may have to count it this is a very on you but it happens we don't limit the amount but we do encourage people to have highest higher quality carbohydrates and what we use is something called the glycemic index and you'll you'll you'll see this and things that we've written and you'll see it on our website too in a nutshell the glycemic index was invented by David Jenkins at the University of Toronto and white bread makes your blood sugar rise pretty quickly so that's high glycemic index rye bread is more gentle on your blood sugar and that's lower glycemic index or pumpernickel even lower or sugar raises your blood sugar really fast but fruit tastes sweet but it doesn't raise your blood sugar as much so fruit is lower glycemic index so we shift from high to low and the rules are really really simple if you go online you'll see a million charts that would drive you crazy but sugar no fruit yes white potatoes not as good as sweet potatoes typical dry cereals are not as good particularly they have a toy inside they tend to they will raise your blood sugar whereas brand cereal or oatmeal are better choices that's kind of it there a few surprises pasta is low fairly low GI even if it's a white pasta being super low and that's kind of it so you're choosing those foods and that's what that's why we do it doctor I have a red piece erm calm over the years and have learned so much from it if you could expound on two points one the difference in the length of the intestines between a herbivore and a carnivore and how important that is and second the amount of protein needed as we go into our senior years okay great points and just really quickly if there are carnivores in the world like cats and just like us as meat goes through the digestive tract carcinogens are formed and lots of other unhealthy things so a carnivore typically has a very short intestinal tract to expel those things quickly herbivores are eating something completely different they're not eating meat so they don't have to expel those things but they're eating lots of fiber E foods so they have a longer digest of track that allows them to extract the nutrients and and also to extract the water that's an intrinsic part of it so if you look at in humans intestinal tract it's it's that of an herbivore rather than then a carnivore your other question was about a protein and aging there there are people who will say that as you get older you need more protein because you're absorbing or using it less efficiently that may be true but the numbers aren't huge you know the people who make liquid supplements would like you to believe you need an enormous amount of added protein the the differences from what I have seen are rather trivial and can be easily accomplished on a plant-based diet dr. Barnard just thank you so so much for your time and the education and empowerment so they diagnosed with MS years ago totally plant-based no medicine phenomenal vegan life question two questions vitamin D has been Danu thing now okay and checked vitamin D levels I'm a veteran and the vitamin D issue has been an issue and then you mentioned fish oils okay and eliminating oils which I agree too but are you okay with the plant base Omega oil from plant oils what do you think about that okay great um what a good audience this is this is like PhD and nutrition yes do great great questions vitamin D is needed for to allow your body to absorb calcium from the foods you eat it also appears to have a cancer preventive function although that's less clear and less known but likely true and vitamin D normally comes from sunlight on our skin and obviously human beings began in Equatorial Africa and we could get all the sunlight we wanted but some of us have the bad judgment to leave a nice place like that and end up in New Jersey there's not as much Sun there and so you can you can become vitamin D deficient and if you use the sunscreen even here in Virginia Beach you will not make vitamin D so if those are the if that's the situation and you're not able to get the twenty minutes a day of sunlight on your face and arms that would give you a vitamin D then you need a supplement and about 2,000 IU's a day is what people would normally suggest and then you can get tested and the tests to always come back low which makes me wonder what are they doing in those testing labs and then some doctors will bump you up to 5000 or something like that with regard to Omega 3 your body has all the machinery it takes to make the Omega 3s you you get alpha this alpha this will not be on the test alpha linolenic acid is very common in many nuts many seeds even vegetables which don't have much fat much of it is in the form of Omega 3 then you have enzymes that lengthen it from the 18 carbon one and a plant to the 20 and 22 carbon ones that your brain wants and you have the enzymes that do that but if I eat a lot of other fats in my Snickers bar oily things I cooked with that ties up those enzymes and makes the a little bit of omega 3 I'm eating not get lengthened so if we have a lot of green leafy vegetables you'll get the traces of Omega 3 that they have and if you're not having a lot of competing fat you can lengthen them and if you wish you can go to the store and they do sell what looks like fish oil but it's derived from algae and it's vegan DHA or EPA they sell it online and it's perfectly fine and there are companies that will actually test your DHA level if you want to and you get tested and see how you do that we don't yet know if there's benefit to that fish oil has really kind of plummeted in the medical world because it has not turned out to be the fantasy and we thought it was going to be whether vegan DHA is helpful I don't know where people are really focusing on it with that say protect the brain against Alzheimer's disease and it may be it may be I don't think there's any harm for taking vegan DHA all right wonderful question thank you all for letting me share this time with you good luck [Applause] you
